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The promise of public education is to provide all students with a high quality learning experience and an equal chance of success. Yet the problem of the achievement gap in our schools between students from different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds reveals that we are still far from delivering on that promise. And a new report from People for Education outlines some of the ways that we are actually making the problem worse.

The report discusses the practice of streaming: grouping students based on ability. Ontario officially ended streaming in 1999, but the report makes a compelling case that we may have ended streaming in name only. Officially we do not have streams but “pathways.” And the idea is to place students into different classes within these pathways, purportedly to better suit their needs and interests.

But the reality on the ground is that almost everyone involved in the school system — parents, students and teachers — still perceives this as an academic hierarchy. Placement within this hierarchy is often based on past achievement, and those placed in lower streams end up doing even more poorly in school.

If these classes truly represented different pathways that best fit the needs and interests of students, we would expect achievement to be similar across them. Yet my own research shows that this is not the case. An analysis of more than 124,000 Ontario students who took Grade 10 math revealed that achievement in applied-level classes was 8 per cent lower compared to academic classes. For Grade 10 English the gap between the two streams was 9 per cent. So it is perhaps no surprise then that students in applied level classes are much less likely to meet the provincial standards on math and reading tests, graduate high school and attend post-secondary education.

But perhaps more alarming than the outcomes is who is placed in the less academic streams. The report reveals that schools with more applied classes are attended by students from families with much lower incomes than those in schools with many students in academic courses. And data from Toronto shows that while students from lower income neighbourhoods are less likely to be identified as gifted, they are much more likely to be identified as having a learning disability, and more than twice as likely to be placed in applied-level classes.

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There is a racial element to streaming as well. Black students represent 13 per cent of Toronto students, but only 3 per cent of students identified as gifted. Meanwhile white students, who make up 32 per cent of the Toronto student population, comprise more than half of the students identified as gifted.

The peculiar thing in Toronto is that we take streaming one step further. While many Ontario school boards stream students into different classes, we also stream students into entirely different schools. Our city is still one of the few that clings to an anachronistic hierarchy of secondary schools with academic “collegiate” schools at the top, “business” and “technical” schools at the bottom. This only exacerbates the negative effects associated with streaming.

‎Defenders of streaming might argue that there is natural variation in children’s abilities, and therefore it makes sense to group students differently on that basis. The problem is that student achievement often has more to do with motivation than innate intelligence.

In the 1970s Calvin Edlund published a study in which he gave 79 children from low income families a standard IQ test. Seven weeks later, the children took another version of the same test, but half received M&Ms for every correct answer. While the IQ scores of the two groups were identical on the first test, on the second test the children that received M&Ms increased their scores dramatically.

A similar study years later found that children who had initially achieved low IQ scores improved their scores so much when they were given M&Ms for correct answers that they were now at the average. These studies tell us that we often underestimate the potential of supposedly low ability children. Given the right motivation, they are capable of higher achievement than we may assume.

Closing the achievement gap involves having high expectations of all students, a tenet that the practice of streaming directly undermines. A more progressive system, one that was truly equitable, would be one in which students from all different socioeconomic, racial and achievement backgrounds learned together. Public education should be in the business of keeping doors open for all students, not closing them prematurely.

Sachin Maharaj holds an MA in educational administration from the University of Toronto and is an assistant curriculum leader in the Toronto District School Board.

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